Ortografía Del Idioma Inglés

PUNCTUATION
Punctuation is used to create sense, clarity and stress in sentences. You use punctuation marks to structure and organize your writing. The most common of these are the period (or full stop in British English), the comma, the exclamation mark, the question mark, the colon and semi-colon, the quote, the apostrophe, the hyphen and dash, and parentheses and brackets. Capital letters arealso used to help us organise meaning and to structure the sense of our writing.

PUNCTUATION

USAGE
use it like a knife to cut the sentences to the required length. Generally, you can break up the sentences using the full stop at the end of a logical and complete thought that looks and sounds right to you: 1. To mark the end of a sentence which is not a question or an exclamation. 2. Toindicate an abbreviation.

EXAMPLES

THE PERIOD (FULL STOP IN BRITISH ENGLISH)

1. I was born in Australia and now live in Indonesia. The Dalai Lama is the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. 2. I will be in between 6 a.m. and 7 p.m.

Dr and Mr and Mrs and Ms do not take a full stop nor do most abbreviations taken from the first capital letters such as MA PhD CNN Use it in the end of asentence. This indicates that only part of the sentence or text has been quoted or that it is being left up to the reader to complete the rest of the sentence.

THREE DOTS

The Lord's Prayer begins, 'Our Father which are in Heaven...'

THE QUESTION MARK

Use it at the end of all direct questions The exclamation mark is used: 1. to express exasperation, astonishment or surprise or toemphasise a comment or short, sharp phrase. 2. You can also use it to mark a phrase as humorous, ironic or sarcastic. Don't overuse the exclamation mark! Don't include a series of exclamation marks.

What is your name? Do you speak French? You're Mexican, aren't you? 1. Help! Help! Get out! Look out! 2.What a lovely day! (When it obviously is not a lovely day) I'll never get it right!!!!

THEEXCLAMATION MARK

Although you will still see the double quotation marks used to quote direct speech it is more and more common to punctuate speech and direct quotations with single quotation marks with the double quotation marks reserved for quoting 'speech within I haven't spoken to Peter for months,' Dianne said. 'The last time I spoke to him he said, "I'm speech'. going to Bahrain and won't be backfor about three years", I've heard nothing since then'. Notice that the comma is placed within the quotation marks and that double quotation marks are only used when the quoted speaker is quoting someone else directly. PUNCTUATING SPEECH

You will also have seen the single quotation marks used to mark out idiomatic expressions

I've always thought that he was very annoying, a bit of a 'pain inthe neck.'

They are also used outside of speech when quoting the title of a journal article. Note that there are a number of ways of organising such things as bibliographies which set out standard formats. Most organisations and academic institutions will prefer one of these or have their own format published in a 'style guide'.

The Migration Flight of the Lesser Tweazle', by Jeremey Adams,in The Bird Spotter Magazine, July 2001.

Generally, parentheses refers to round brackets () and brackets to square brackets [ ]. However, we are more and more used to hearing these referred to simply as 'round brackets' or 'square brackets'. Usually we use square brackets - [ ] - for special purposes such as in technical manuals. Round brackets - ( ) -, or 'parentheses' are used in a similarway to commas when we want to add further explanation, an afterthought, or comment that is to do with our main line of thought but distinct from it.

BRACKETS AND PARENTHESIS 1. Further explanation. 2. Comment. 3. Afterthought. 1. The government's education report (April 2005) shows that the level of literacy is rising in nearly all areas. 2. I visited Kathmandu (which was full of tourists) on...